Rodgers Dismisses Talk Of The Title As Mad Phil Throws His Player Under A Bus.

It was a tale of two managers today again, as Rodgers gave a calm and measured press conference at Celtic as, across the city, Clement gave another interview that lurched into the realms of the surreal. It is hard to know whether or not this guy is trolling us; I am starting to think that maybe he is. Because it’s every single week now he says stuff that is slightly mad.

The Celtic boss was typically calm and composed. I thought he handled himself very well, much as Taylor had before him. He didn’t want to talk about the title race. He was clear on that. Still, he got the inevitable questions on it. He gave the answer that you just knew was going to be making all the headlines, and it did just that this evening.

“Listen, we haven’t won anything yet,” he said. It is the best possible riposte to those in the media who are hoping to see signs of complacency. “We can only do our work because you can’t soften up, especially at this time, just because another team have drawn or lost or whatever. That’s irrelevant. You have to perform and get the result. If you come off it against teams that are motivated and organised then they can give you a problem. For us, we have to continually focus on our own performance irrespective of what happens elsewhere.”

The world “irrelevant” is the one the media has chosen to focus on, that and the idea that we won’t “soften up.” But he’s not fishing for soundbites here, he’s stating the bald truth of it. If we go into a single one of these games expecting to win, we’re needlessly making trouble for ourselves. We have to treat these matches, all of them, as separate cup finals.

This was the part I loved from him; “We have to create our story and for that we have to work at it. Hopefully, that will be the storyline come the end of the season. It’s not how you start the marathon; it’s how you finish it.”

Aside from how on the nose that last part was, this is not the first time that Rodgers has discussed events around this season as a “story” or referred to the “storyline.” This is strange, but I get what he is doing. He’s reminding the media of what he said some weeks ago about the narrative against us this whole campaign – which I wrote about last night.

But he’s also reminding them of something they appear to have forgotten; “history is written by the winners.” And that’s crucial. He knows if he wins the double, he shatters the media’s version of the story and gets to subtract it for one that ends in a victory lap.

The team aren’t the only ones hitting their stride at just the right time in the season. This guy is as well, and I think he’s sounding strong and ready.

In contrast to him is the lunatic across the city, who spent Wednesday night telling us how good his team were on the night only to have his own player, Dujon Sterling, hilariously contradict him and deliver the verdict that most of the fans agreed with when he pronounced them to having been “shit.”

Manneken Piss was on top form tonight. In one deranged moment he compared losing a game to going to Hell, but said that it was more than made up for because you also got to go to heaven. This after a comment last week about being willing to play on Mars. He compared Sterling to Virgil Van Dijk … and at the same time had a dig at him about his fitness, which was a pretty cheap shot considering some of the people in his team.

“It’s words of a player who’s disappointed because we lost points who maybe lacks a little bit of experience in that way,” he said, as if you need to have played at the highest level for 20 years to know when you and your team had a bad game. “If I see Virgil van Dijk giving a press interview yesterday after the game, it’s totally different and that’s the way it should be.”

Actually, if Van Dijk had given a press conference after a result like that where he maintained that everything had been fine no journalist in England would have let him away with it and nor would his manager. Sterling only said what everyone knew, everyone except the manager himself who evidently did believe that his team were brilliant.

“Those are things for young players to learn and to become better. It’s more talking out of frustration but I know we can count on Dujon on the field with what he’s done in the last couple of months, the moments he was fit,” said Clement, in a quite incredible moment of bitchery. “That’s not been the case enough for me. We will work with him on that.”

This guy is not just cracking; he has cracked. Our manager is a class act. Theirs … is slightly mad.